2016-03-20

Cogito, ergo sum

Some days ago I wrote a post on AlphaGo, DeepMind and the GO competition. In the post I urged DeepMind to go for something much harder StarCraft. This was not a random selection, my youngest son happened to be one of Europe's best StarCraft player some years ago. First I dismissed his obsession with the game as just unhealthy waste of time. But after watching him play a few times I changed my mind. I realised StarCraft is an extremely complex game. I still remember the son preparing for a game. ‘I must be in a good mood and have slept well, otherwise I will loose”, “I need to be alert”, he warmed up as a top athlete, with finger practices for the dexterity. StarCraft openings are slow you don’t see much activity it’s more strategy you position for the final kill in the end play where the speed of keystrokes and mouse moves often are insane. “One erroneous move and you’re lost”.

“The best players are not particularly fast, it’s a strategy game much more complex than Chess” my son said. He spend more time studying other players and reading game theory. He tried to study old games of upcoming opponents to understand how they play and finding ways to outsmart them.

I think StarCraft will be a hard nut to crack for DeepMind. They or some other will finally defeat humans in a fair game of StarCraft of that I’m am sure. But will that program contain true intelligence I’m not so sure. It will definitely not be ‘human intelligent’, we may eventually construct ‘human intelligence’ or even ‘super human intelligence’ but that will be 20 years from now for a long time to come, of that I’m pretty certain.

Lately I seen people claiming the Turing test is wrong, since a program can pass the test without having all human characteristics of intelligence. Turing himself was open to ‘alien’ artificial intelligence. One day in a distant future we may see AI smarter than human. But then I’m gone and you too. Actually all of mankind will be annihilated.